In every issue of Biomass Magazine dedicated to equipment and equipment innovations, the men and women who put these machines to work jump off the page. This is the case in Senior Editor Ron Kotrba’s very thorough page-12 story, “Acid Gas Control Strategies,” in which he leverages the decades of industry knowledge his sources possess to compare dry sorbent injection and wet scrubbing approaches. Kotrba connected with both Link Landers, CEO of PPC Industries, and Mitch Lund, a technical services engineer from Nol-Tec Systems, to outline when and why each system is deployed, and the advantages and optimal deployment of each technology. These technologies, while impressive in their own right, are merely extensions of the human minds that invent, deploy and optimize them.  This is fortunate, because as Lund told Kotrba, “The general trends in the industry show that as years pass, newer compounds are added to regulation laws and existing compounds come under tighter regulations.” Lund and Landers helped Kotrba understand the connection between the emissions control technologies widely deployed today, and the policies that catalyzed their development.

While Kotrba’s story looks at mature technologies invented to comply with increased regulation, Managing Editor Anna Simet’s page-40 feature, “Regs and Bacon,” explores technology innovations in earlier stages of development, initiatives being spurred by North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate. Simet’s piece investigates how a carve-out for swine waste-derived electricity in the state renewable portfolio standard is driving innovation within the biogas sector. Broadly speaking, anaerobic digestion (AD) is not a new technology. But if ambitious goals like the kind North Carolina has set are to be met, the AD of swine waste within existing hog production systems must be perfected. Swine waste offers its own challenges for designers of AD systems, and Simet learned that the market opportunity generated by this state-specific policy has motivated more than a few designers and builders to overcome the unique challenges inherent to this abundant feedstock.

Policy drives innovation. The Clean Air Act gave rise to the control of acidic gases through dry sorbent injection and wet scrubbers, and North Carolina’s swine waste carve-out may well yield a workable digestion approach for a feedstock that, for a long time, technology developers avoided. This story is playing out all across the biomass sector, proving that this industry’s most impressive machine is the one residing between our collective ears.

Author: Tim Portz
Vice President of Content & Executive Editor
tportz@bbiinternational.com